Digital is a platform and the idea is the train

Recently, a very dear friend of mine posted something about digital agencies on Facebook. It was the digital agency drinking game and you were to take a shot every time they say: terribly tiny tales, influencers, contextual, geotagging, VJ Jose, Instastories, webisodes, memes, BuzzFeed and “digital is the new mainline.”

A senior creative director at Leo Burnett, he has always been an astute observer and this post was no exception. There, hiding in plain sight,was evidence of the biggest problem with the ‘digital agency’ in India.

If you look closely at the list, you realise all these are platforms, mediums or ways of getting communication out on digital. The digital equivalent of RJ mentions, newspaper inserts, cinema slides or product placement in TV shows. Call Terribly Tiny Tales and they will quickly whip up some intelligent posts hoping to leave you moved with just a few words; send your products to a group of influencers and soon they will populate perfectly candid yetposed imagery of your brand across all staple lifestyle contexts: first-class air travel, Bandra’s artsy vegan cafes and early morning runs on Marine Drive. And we all know that Buzzfeed can make a listicle on anything under the sun – from 12 ways to butter your bread to 27 things you didn’t know about your right toenail – as long as you’re willing to shell out a few lakhs. Before you know it, you’re sitting on 6 million impressions across 97 countries with countless likes, shares, retweets, reposts, snaps, screenshots, pokes, loves, tags, mentions, stories and whatever else the complicated digital agency ROI presentation mentioned, that you didn’t quite get into.

But these digital agencies seem to be forgetting one important question – where is the idea? What is the brand’s message,pointof view or stance? Why are we even doing this communication? All you get, instead, are a bunch of hashtags (preferably with puns) and options for how you can blazon them to the world. It would be easy to conclude that digital is nothing but faff. However, the problem goes deeper – it isn’t the medium or the agency that’s at fault, it’s the ecosystem.

Most digital agencies in India combine media buying and creative. As we all know, they make most of theirrevenue from the former and a pittance via creative fees. It’s not uncommon for the retainer to be 1/10th that of a mainline agency. So, obviously, media gets the focus, creative gets deprioritised, and hence, the idea gets deprioritised. Good creative talent is expensive, after all. And why would a digital media agency chase highly paid creative directors when they can make more with college kids spewing out hashtags by the dozen and then deploy them for an influencer campaign with low production costs, a fat media commission and the unsaid kickback (which can sometimes be as high as 50%)?

Furthermore, clients seem to be happy with this system too. Not only are they relying on digital media agencies to come up with “ideas” but are now entrusting them the job of producing content. ‘Let’s make a low budget film, put it online, and buy TV rights later if it gets a good response’, seems to be the law of the land. And of course, let’s try to make the first five seconds the best. This ecosystem leads to budgets going away from production and into digital media. Then we wait with bated breath for the video to go viral, conveniently forgetting that three hours of content gets uploadedonYouTube every second. Virality needs something disruptive, and that usually comes from creative minds. Which as I said earlier, aren’t there in the media-led digital ecosystem.

How else can we explain the lack of a single inspiring big idea on digital yet? Every year, India wins 30-40 Cannes Lions – why aren’t any of them for digital? Forget creativity for a second, if most of India’s digital agencies are media experts only – why haven’t we even seen an innovative use of the medium that gets the world to take notice? For a country that exports tech knowledge to the whole world, are we really that bad? Or is it that ideas are expensive?

People have often asked me why I didn’t get into digital, and this is the exact reason. Without a media-buying arm subsidising costs, there is no way to sustain a good, creative digital agency. And I believe that without creative at its core, a digital agency is like a body without a soul.

Things are poised to change dramatically. With Google and Facebook selling media directly and working with clients like quasi-digital agencies, media-focused shops will suffer. Further, with the 2019 elections loom- ing, India’s biggest political parties will become the largest media buyers online. If history has taught us anything, we can expect social media to be floating with fake news. Brands will need to up their game to get eyeballs and the only solution from a media buyer will be ‘spend more!’

Today, you can get a million likes for a poop emoji with enough money behind it. The start of the end of social media’s credibility is already here. It can be consumed, manipulated and forgotten easily. The only way your brand will stick is if you have a big idea. Startthere byseparating the identity of a digital creative agency and a digital media agency. Start with a creative agency that can thinkforyour brand in a digital-first world. And then call the media guys to execute its dissemination online: the best rates from influencers, calling VJ Jose or ensuring that your store launch posts are geotagged correctly.

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